Farsens Intros Weight-Monitoring RFID Tag

Farsens, a Spanish developer of RFID sensor tags, has introduced the Atlas, a passive ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) tag designed for monitoring weight in applications for which accessibility is limited, or for companies that do not want to add the cost of wiring or battery maintenance. Intended applications include warehouse inventories, especially for granulates and liquids stored in big containers. According to Farsens, companies can have a variety of containers with unknown quantities of product—at any level from empty to full—and the Atlas helps them quantify their inventories by reading the tag information within a matter of seconds.

Farsens' Atlas-Q2000L sensor tag

The Atlas, compliant with the EPC Gen 2 and ISO 18000-6C standards, features Farsens' UHF RFID IC. This, the company reports, enables it to transmit a unique identifier and the associated weight measurement data collected by the sensor to a commercial RFID reader without the need of a battery on the sensor tag.

There are currently two versions of the Atlas tag. The PB-ATLAS-Q100L-V01 is designed for measuring compression loads ranging from 0 kilogram-force (kgf) to 45 kgf, and made with Measurement Specialties' FC23 compression load cells. The ATLAS-Q2000L is designed for measuring compression loads ranging from 0 kgf to 900 kgf, and features Measurement Specialties' FX1901 compression load cells.

The tags come in a variety of antenna designs and sizes to adapt the performance to the required application in the 860 to 960 MHz band, Farsens reports. The reading distance is around 1.5 meters (5 feet), and the tags can be embedded in a wide variety of materials, such as plastics or concrete. Evaluation kits are available.